


you made me love you

by threadoflife



Category: Regeneration - Pat Barker
Genre: Angst, Death, Gen, Gender Roles, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Possibly Unrequited Love, Regeneration Trilogy, Repression, Shell Shock, War, World War I, craiglockhart hospital
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 02:53:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7995934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threadoflife/pseuds/threadoflife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No, the mind is never safe. Maybe it would be, one day. Maybe, in another hundred years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. REGENERATION, CRAIGLOCKHART

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this on and off ages ago, and before it gathers dust on my hardrive I thought I'd post it.
> 
> It's quite a bit of self-indulgent sentimentality tbh, because while I was reading the trilogy I was mentally tl;dr-ing non-stop. It's mostly based on the book, but one or two allusions to the movie are made as well.

(1)

This morning, in the paper. A boy in the casualty list—seventeen.

Another one. Among all the other seventeens.

He tells himself at least they’re over sixteen and eats his porridge.

*

Siegfried is good at golf. Anderson mentions it once, saying, “He plays well,” out of the blue. Rivers looks at him. “Golf,” he elaborates. “He’s good at golf.”

Rivers inclines his head and doesn’t say, _I know. I’ve seen him._

“Asked my opinion on the iron he should use.” Anderson is looking somewhere to Rivers’ right, at something only he sees. There’s a pause, Anderson still staring until he snaps out of it. His eyes find Rivers again, and he adds, “He’s a good man,” and though it’s unspoken, they both hear it. _Despite that Declaration_.

This time, Rivers says, “Yes, he is,” because some unspoken things require negation.

It’s only later in bed, when Rivers is almost asleep, that the thought manages to slip into his head, like a stray orphan insistently tugging on his trousers asking for food when all he wants is to keep walking: he had known. When Anderson had used the quite unspecific ‘he,’ Rivers had instantly known it was Siegfried he’d been talking about. 

He is asleep before the thought reaches any conclusion.

*

Siegfried is good at golf.

In fact, Siegfried is good at a great number of things: rhetoric, for instance. He knows to choose his words with care and always succeeds, and his voice is strong and pleasant, demanding one’s focus. He has people skills, is adored by his men and easily takes in people who have known him for only a little while. He is made for leadership; he has a flexible, sharp intellect; a great amount (and dangerous kind) of charisma; and much emotional depth. 

_Perhaps too much of the latter,_ Rivers thinks to himself privately, as their sessions progress. But this is between them, so it hardly matters.

Siegfried is also good at writing; Rivers found a sheet of paper with a poem in the crack of his door the other day. He didn’t know what to do with it as psychiatrist, but he still uses it, telling himself it’s a medical document serving as written proof of Siegfried’s anti-war complex.

That he kept this one (and others, too; Siegfried keeps slipping him these sheets of paper, and for no reason he can explain Rivers always first looks over his shoulder up and down the corridor before he puts them into his pocket)—well. He kept them in his position as psychiatrist, of course, because he provides medical, psychological aftercare. That’s his function. They might be of some use to him in one of their sessions; they do grant him insight into Siegfried's character, after all.

There’s nothing odd about it, surely.

He doesn’t notice when, after the ninth, he instinctively begins sliding them in between his private papers instead of Siegfried’s medical file.

*

Among all the men at Craiglockhart, Rivers finds something he’s felt was missing all his life. A kind of warmth, he supposes, a kind of kinship. Purpose, maybe. He’s hesitant to pen it down anywhere—he is a gentleman, but wartime tends to wind the present ropes even tighter; he doesn’t fancy his name in a black book, however imaginary—so he keeps it to himself. 

The others notice, of course.

Bryce is the first. He passes Rivers in the hallway, and, pausing, says, “Slept well last night?”

Rivers, smiling, frowns. “I did, yes, but—”

“Your face,” Bryce says. “It’s got something clearer about it.”

The next noon, a nurse leans in close, confiding quietly, “Craiglockhart is as happy to have you as you are happy to be here,” and Rivers thanks her, somewhat dumbfounded.

It is only when he walks into the ward the next morning, and there is that moment—something solid, that, shaking, unfolds, taking a gust of coldness with itself—that he thinks, _oh._

He looks at all these twitching, paralysed, hysterical men, feels a smile come to his face, and thinks, _oh, here we are. Good morning._

He wonders what it says about himself that this is home.

*

Siegfried is different, of course.

He cannot reason with any scientific proof, or any law.

He just flushes, head to toe it seems, and tries to speak around the humiliation in his throat. It’s terrible to watch. The more agitated Siegfried becomes, the more Rivers wants to lean back in his seat and be calm, which agitates Siegfried all the more.

There is an odd imbalance, here: Rivers’ Cambridge don masculine rationality and senior wisdom cool and composed in the face of Siegfried’s increasingly irrational and young passion, so—well, for lack of a better word, so feminine in his reasoning. He doesn’t have science on his side, or law—quite the opposite, really—but he has his heart on his heart on his side, which culminates in emotional reasoning.

There is an odd imbalance here, and Rivers supposes that Siegfried feels it’s about simple binarisms—the usual ones such as superior/inferior, masculine/feminine, Dr./patient, intellect/emotion...—but therapy, really, is a much more dangerous area. Nothing is simple here.

Siegfried probably wouldn’t believe him if he told him that the imbalance between them is the fact that this Mad Jack in a Scots’ loony bin for having thrown his Cross away and gone pacifist by writing declarations won’t learn—and instead makes Rivers, established military psychiatrist, think stupid things:

_If saying you’re against the war based purely on not wanting more seventeen year olds dead is feminine, then one has to be that. Then one has to stop being a man. Or else there’s little hope left for us._

_Call no man happy until he is dead._

“—will I help them by dying in France? It’s for them that I do this, and nothing will change if I go back only to die. I can do more damage here at home where it counts—”

Siegfried, Rivers thinks, only half-listening, staring at his patient with lowered eyes, is probably one of the few who’s been to France and has come back healthy. 

Seeing dead men (occasionally) and having nightmares is almost a side effect of the times they live in. 

*

The only thing not healthy about Siegfried is the suicide mission he seems to be on. He’s hell-bent on self-destruction, and the worst of it is—if the war won’t kill him, home will. 

It makes Rivers want to cry, sometimes. 

The point is—Siegfried is good at golf, good at writing; he’s a bright man, excelled academically (even if the books couldn’t keep him) just as he excelled in the military. He’s good on a horse, good at hunting, has fine manners, and the list goes on and it goes on and it goes on. It seems to be all Rivers is thinking about, these days.

Siegfried is so good he almost shines, as if—

The window rattles in its frame, and Rivers blinks.

It’s night. He’s in his bed. He’s staring wide-eyed at the shadows on the ceiling. His breathing is fast, shallow. 

He wasn’t aware he was doing either.

This is the first time it occurs to him, then: who will burn first? Siegfried, flying too high to the sun?

Or Rivers, the moth to his flame?


	2. EYE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Mid-April, London 1918)

(2)

Time goes on, and Rivers does not read the morning paper anymore. Ignoring the piles of paper his landlady leaves pointedly lying around has become routine. 

These days, he forces down his porridge.

He must eat it; the seventeens would be glad for having warm food.

*

He hasn’t seen Siegfried in very long.

He’s glad about that.

*

Prior is the highlight of his days, even if he’s a devil. Rivers finds himself ruminating on whether Prior is a devil by circumstance, or self-willed, or naturally. Predictably enough, his conclusions vary: when Prior regresses to punching his balled fists into River’s chest because he doesn’t know how to ask for comfort—and Rivers doesn’t know how to give it, does nothing except standing there, stricken, stiff, like the British stiff upper lip he is—Rivers, obviously, thinks he’s a devil by circumstance. Other times, when Prior embellishes his speech with too much vulgarity, Rivers tries hard not to smile, because there’s the self-willed devil all over again.

When Prior does things like plainly proposition him in his own home, Rivers just regards him calmly—he does everything calmly, from panicking to being happy—and sees the natural devil.

Perhaps Prior is all three. The human psyche is never one, after all.

*

The more time goes on, the less Rivers looks at his own reflection in the mirror. It’s a gradual process, begins first out of haste: he’s dreamt badly (nightmares), gets out of bed too late, hurries when he’s dressing and washing himself clinically, so he simply forgets. Soon haste turns into habit, since dreaming badly is something he now does often. Even sooner, habit turns into unwillingness.

He isn’t sure if it’s because of the papers or not. He’s still ignoring them, although they’re taunting him—which is such a silly thought. Inanimate objects can’t taunt. He’s only projecting, but that insight doesn’t really make it better.

Every time he thinks of checking his reflection his thoughts wander, of their own, to a novella—just a small book, really—and then he wants to sit down and write about the terror of words.

It’s Jekyll and Hyde, all over again, only his never comes out. If it did he’d have heard of it already, he’d have known.

No, not him; Hyde doesn’t come out, he is him, is one with Jekyll. He holds Hyde so close to his chest he doesn’t think there’s a difference between them anymore.

Sometimes, at night, when he comes back from helping patients who’ve been scratching walls in their sleep or twitching themselves awake with screams stuck in their throats, or just after dinner, when Burns (God, Burns) didn’t get down a single spoon again—on an impulse, then, after these times, he does it: he glances up, urged by something dark and unquantifiable in depth, and sees his own gaunt face, steadily becoming older. He doesn’t know his own eyes any longer.

Sometimes, it takes him longer to figure out which is the mask and which isn’t.

Sometimes, he wonders if he’s always been Hyde. And if he hasn’t, then he just doesn’t know how to be different anymore.

*

One night, he jumps out of bed as if a gunshot has gone off somewhere. Shaken from another nightmare, cold and sweaty, he staggers machine-like to the table with all the newspapers.

He devours the lists, eyes roving over all the names of so many dead people.

 **WOUNDED** gunshot, buttock; … gunshot, arm; … shock; … gunshot, legs; … left leg; … shell shock explosion…

 **DIED OF WOUNDS** No. 54,292 … No. 47,202 … No. 46,018 … No. 171,002 … No. 438,720…

**KILLED IN ACTION…**

He doesn’t cry then.

*

On another night, not much later—sometime after Prior admitted to him he was being two people at once lately—the same happens, only this time his addled mind doesn’t lead him to the newspapers.

Instead, he sits down by flickering candlelight, grabs a piece of paper and begins to write. He writes, compulsively, mindlessly, his hand moving stiffly and his fingers gripping the pen so tightly until they hurt. 

It’s a ghost that’s moving his hand.

(Is it?)

When he is done, he sits back and reads:

_Do you have an upstairs, too? An attic? Is there—_

_No, Siegfried, you don’t. Not you. You declare. There is no upstairs for you. You declare, things like, “It is my belief that...” and you proceed to say what your belief is, just like that._

_There is a danger in that, you see. The buttons come loose and the strings snap apart, exposing this ugly thing wrapped up tight within. There is no upstairs for you: you open the windows and their shutters and all the air rushes through, you care not if foul or fresh, but the old clothes and the mice and the dust all stir, there is nothing left untouched._

_The door won’t close, or if it will—with the windows open you will see the light of day, it will come and go like the night does, but you can stay upstairs because it changes; you can watch the sun bleach the wallpaper so all the patterns do not always stay obscured, and your eyes won’t have to strain. It is not an easy floor. The mice might be hungry, and maybe they will feed on your fingers. You will cough, when the air is foul and thick—maybe choke._

_But your eyes will be open and you will see, and because the door will open sometimes (if it is shut), you can wander the rest of the house where your fancy takes you._

_But what am I saying. We all have upstairs, I know better than that. I see upstairs all the time (I see. Prior would like that), but everyone so forcefully remains lodged in their kitchen chair eating stale porridge and drinking cold tea. And this room, just as stale and cold, is so silent the absence of sound is gaping through the open doors. And then through this timelessness, just as you are about to bite into a steaming piece of cod with white, soft flesh—very unexpectedly, your teeth will break as they bite into something sharp and hard and cold instead, and upstairs comes rattling down like a screech of all the ‘if’s and ‘but’s and ‘why’s kept trapped in the attic of the head, and it will be so violent and simple—primitive, really, one might say uncivilized—that everyone will turn and look. This is everybody’s upstairs._

_Hidden, unseen, packed away._

_But not yours. Yours is not like this. Yours is open, ever present. And when it becomes too loud there, you invite people to come in and see, and I would. I would. I have. But the buttons loosen, Siegfried. The strings span more and more, become thinner. And I do not see—do not, cannot visualize (have I ever told you this?)—and I feel this thing I do not see instead._

_This is the danger, your danger. It makes mortal more than the casualty lists do—the trenches—shells—gas._

_This is another kind of mortality, Siegfried. It is not yours to slay._

_Don’t—_

_Please._

Rivers stares blankly at the page. He has no idea what this is. 

In his throat, his heart is thumping painfully, almost as if it wants out, which is a physical impossibility, of course—but then he just keeps staring at the page, at the words written by a ghost that is him.

These words must have been haunting the attic inside his head all this time, and he hadn’t even noticed. 

They’re too late, anyway. Siegfried is long gone now, back in France.

He hasn’t seen Siegfried in so, so long.

For the first time in years, Rivers bows forwards, bows his body in half in the chair, grips his head as if he could control his thoughts in there—all these unwritten, unspoken words—and cries.

He cries and cries and cries.

*

It takes him a while to get himself back under control, and even once he’s done, he finds he’s still talking to Siegfried inside his head. The stopper is either gone or distorted so out of proportion it doesn’t fit anymore; his inside is brimming with unsaid words. He’s almost back to who he was before—whoever that was—but still he’s talking to Siegfried inside his head, things like:

_Thank you for their tea._

_I could not look at the casualty list this morning._

_Take me to France._

_I wish I were half as brave as you._

_Mad Jack suits you, but not for the reasons you got the name._

_I don’t think it is you who is mad._

_William._

_A seventeen year old._

_Siegfried, I—I don’t think I can do this anymore._

_I am William._

_A seventeen year old._

_I had a nightmare, and it was you._

_Will you call me William?_

*

Words, Rivers learns, do not have power only when written down.

Words that go unspoken are another register of terror, and they can become infections: infections in the brain, infections in the chest, rotting the body from the inside out. There is no pure biology. 

The mind and the body, always connected somehow.

Fascinating, the process of how haunting can turn physical.


	3. GHOST

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (July 1919)

(3)

His landlady stops leaving newspapers on the table. There was something by the War Office going around, just a few weeks ago—rumours of censorship—and it shows. 

Rivers can’t read about seventeen year olds being killed anymore, so he thinks about them instead, like at breakfast when he’s faced with his traditional porridge.

All these seventeen year old soldiers (and that should be an oxymoron, but it isn’t) would die for some porridge, surely. Or they’d kill for it.

Or would they be doing both?

Both, Rivers thinks, unbidden. They already are doing both.

By the time he swallows it down, the porridge has gone cold.

*

When it comes, the message shakes him to his nerves.

Siegfried is in hospital. 

He goes to see him, of course. He’s in an odd state—moving, but it’s not really _him_ that’s moving, it’s more like someone else is in possession of his body and is just pulling him along. It reminds him of Prior, but before he can think about that, Siegfried is already there and he’s alive, he is so frighteningly alive that the joy Rivers experiences—sharp and bright, unfiltered for once, and entirely overwhelming—feels dangerously like the sensation of utter free-fall he’d had back in Melanesia when faced with the freedom of social conventions.

He wants to kiss Siegfried, suddenly, here, right now, prompted by that joy. In that moment, it feels imperative that he do it, as if this is the single most important moment of his life.

But he doesn’t, of course; oh, of course he doesn’t. He merely sits in the chair and stares at Siegfried and endures the joy calmly, and he can’t even think too much about it, which is the public school factor all over again: he can’t even think about it properly, is sure he couldn’t even visualise if he could visualise things. 

The Melanesian free-fall had ended with Brennan—a terrible man involved in human trafficking and raping—and this most private of free-falls now would not end much differently but in another kind of disaster. 

Because nothing is ever sure, nothing is ever safe, not in this lifetime. Despite how much his blood is rushing with it, despite how much his body is trembling with it, wanting to kiss Siegfried, Rivers can’t even think about it—he can’t even admit this to himself inside his head, in this most private of spaces, his mind, because even the mind is never private; even the mind is never safe; the mind, after all, is one of the first spaces—along with the body—that is never granted immunity. The mind has become one of the first places men tread on, men in uniforms that wave their flags of ‘you should’ and ‘this is not allowed’ around, stabbing them into some area of your self, until every area of the mind is claimed by a regulation, the other by an unspoken rule, the other by this, the other by that.

No, the mind is never safe. Maybe it would be, one day. Maybe, in another hundred years.

Rivers, frozen to his place, feels a little piece of his self dying away. Maybe it had begun dying a while ago, when he’d read his first ‘seventeen’ in the morning paper. Maybe it had begun when he’d seen Siegfried for the first time, that fatal, terrible first time. 

(Fatal and terrible both because of the same reason: because he would always have come to see Siegfried the way he does now. Because he would always have come to want to kiss Siegfried.)

Rivers, frozen to his place, feels a little piece of his self dying away as he keeps listening to an almost manic Siegfried raving about how children need to be trained into killing machines if war is to exist at all.

In the background, the gramophone croons out all the things Rivers will never be able to say.

 

_You made me love you_  
_I didn’t think you’d do it_  
_I didn’t think you’d do it_  
_You made me want you_  
_all the time you knew it  
_ _I guess you always knew it_

_You made me happy sometimes,_  
_you made me glad_  
_but there were times, dear,  
_ _oh, I felt so bad..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI5FAwhjrNE
> 
> this is the song--al jolson's 'you made me love you.' and yes, pat barker really DID put that in the book. because she's evil.


End file.
